"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure."

Developed Experiments

As you can probably tell my title is mainly portraying my work over the last month. It has been a hard couple of weeks because most of the time I don't even know what i'm going to accomplish or doing for the matter of fact. But it all just depends if that idea in your head is even worth producing and when you have done it you think its the best piece you've done yet.

So here are my developed experiments for my Final Major Project. From the end of March  have begun to experiment in mixed media rather than just painting because  find the more materials you use the better outcome you will get. Plus I can't go without using a Biro on any experimental drawing as you can see above. 

The techniques I have used for all of these works above are;

Printing, Acetate 'Window Sheet' techniques, painting using a roller, scratch and ink painting, collage textures, wax resist, and many others that I can't think of right now :'0

Over the Easter Break (woohoooo!!) I will continue to produce off-balance work and more ideas in order to produce and present my final piece.

John Piper

Ruin uses in Art

Ruin Uses in Art

One of the things I was researching is how ruins have been used in the past. There are plenty of examples of ruins integrated into cities, and it is interesting to see how these ruins were/are used.

Painting of ruins sometimes depict specific historical or biblical scenes, and are often not "snapshots" but rather imagined scenes. Nonetheless, the depiction of ruins in art can tell us a lot about how ruins were used historically and give us an indication of how the West thinks about ruins. Below are some examples of ruins in painting, along with comments about what we can learn from each.


Marco Ricci (1700s) Figures among Ruins
This picture captures an scene from everyday life. Women at the center launder clothing. A woman stands behind a table to the left, making it seem that this is a business and not just private women. Ruins were often open spaces in a city, and could be used for a variety of activities that required open areas.


Paul Brill (1580) Landscape with Roman Ruins
Ruins stand on both sides of a road. Rather than form a crucial part of the activity taking place, they seem more incidental. They sit on the edge of a built-up modern city, perhaps as a reminder. The road to the left seems to actually go straight through the ruin. In the lower left corner, we see a beggar. He sits both on the road and outside the ruin, reminding us that ruins could be inhabited by people on the fringe of society.


Alessandro Magnasco (1710) Banditti at Rest
Here too we see outsiders, the Banditti, taking up residence in ruins and using it as a resting place beyond the rules of society. Equipment is tied to the columns. A man plays guitar at the center.


Giovanni Pannini (1744) Apostle Paul Preaching on the RuinsThis work shows an event in the life of St. Paul, but demonstrates that a ruin was also a place for gatherings. Paul, it should be remembered, could be seen as a subversive element, so this may be another reason why he would preach in ruins.


Salvator Rose (1660-5) Anchorites Tempted by DemonsRuins were commonly used for monks to take up residence. This was fitting both because the ruins were secluded places, ripe for contemplation, and thought to be inhabited by demons. The monks were often called upon to fight the demons and prove that Christianity was superior to the demons. This was more common in isolated ruins at a distance from cities.


Claude Lorrain - The Campo Viccino, RomeRome was teeming with ruins. Here we see ruins amidst an open piazza being used as a recreation ground within the city. People gather, sit around, dogs run freely, and people ride horses.


Jacob Ruisdael (1657) The Jewish CemeteryRuins have a strong connection to death, and were often used artistically as amomento mori. Here we see ruins as the backdrop of a cemetery.

Computer Software Experiments

Hiya,
Lately I've started doing some computer experiments instead of just doing the same old thing. I've found it quite a challenge to be introduced to new software and to be able to work on it just after watching a tutorial on YouTube but it has been fun just to mess with all the tools they have and see how it turns out. So the programmes I have been using are:

• Photoshop
• Fireworks
• Paint.NET
• Photo pos pro

Yet Photoshop is not the only option. I've used Fireworks for many years now and find it to be by far the easiest and fastest way to get ideas out of my head and into pixels on the screen.

Let me be clear: I am in no way dismissing Photoshop or those who choose to use it. I use it for plenty of tasks. Personal preference is the most important factor when selecting your tools, and if your preference is Photoshop, then that’s what you should use.
Photoshop is a wonderful program, but its tool set is vast—it is used for a huge range of applications, from photo manipulation and illustration to 3-D modeling.
Photoshop:
Because i have never used this software before I had wanted to broaden my skill and working practice range by starting something new. SO what I tried to do here was to create the image over image idea by placing an image in a layer and then working with the tools to make it transparent so I could prepare another image in a different layer ready to group them all together and edit necessary parts of the image whilst using the magic wand and the paint bucket.
So this is how it had turned out:

Basically what I tried to create here was the reflections of the trees overlapped over a forest scene image.

Fireworks:

In fireworks what I wanted to do was to minimize the pixels of the quality of the image as well as to do some basic editing for example: grouping, and changing the overall hue and saturation of the image. The tools i used were colour contrasting and shape effects.

So this is how the grouping ones turned out: